Reflective thinking is the NEOMED way. The comments below are a final reflection by Lufengzi Yuan (Agnes), one of six students from Anhui Medical University in Hefei, China, who spent the 2017-18 academic year in an educational exchange between Anhui (pronounced On-Qway) Medical University and NEOMED’s College of Pharmacy.
The students recently received a certificate of attendance after participating in first-year and second-year College of Pharmacy courses, each for one semester.
What impressed me most maybe the weather here. From November to April, the snowflakes surprised us temporarily through Christmas to Easter. (Actually, I’m looking forward to the last sight of snow when I take the flight back to China in May, LOL.)
For the study part, the first shock here is the brand new online learning system branded by NEOMED as Academic Integrated Management System (AIMS) which created an open source collaborative learning environment. Initially, we got a self-paced technology training to familiar ourselves with this system as preparation for working with AIMS in the future. To be specific, we can do many things through this system such as add an auto-updating calendar of all the courses to my personal Gmail account, download the handouts and preview for the lectures, submit the assignments, know the information about tests and quizzes and even play back the lecture videos. In general, it provides much convenient and instant information for us although it actually takes a long time for us to find the exact position of each curriculum’s different resources.
For the life part, what I like the most is our traveling here with different friends. I went to Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Niagara Falls during the breaks. There are wonderful architectures and deep-dish pizza in Windy City, hustle and bustle city life in New York, the academic atmosphere and frozen Charles River in Boston, countless museums and cherry blossom in D.C. and many other wonderful memories.
Through the traveling in various cities, I have a new cognition of the culture in this country, which I think is diversity and comprehensive. For example, I once saw a cool man wearing black leather jacket and bright red skirt with high heels, walking confidently on the street in the SoHo area of New York. It seems that he was walking with wind. Thus, what else can demoralize ourselves? As long as I think, it is ourselves who can build our own confidence and refresh ourselves from the bottom of the heart. Although my oral and listening English is still not good enough for influent communicate, I’d like to talk and discuss with different classmates, professor and even strangers here which enrich my life mostly.